Signed and Inscribed Langston Hughes' Simple Stakes a Claim First Edition, 1957

Langston Hughes

First Edition

[African American][Literature] Hughes, Langston. Simple Stakes a Claim (1957) is the author’s fourth work rendering midcentury Black life through the voice of Jesse B. Semple, known as “Simple,” a working class Harlem everyman whose humor and indignation frame questions of race, labor, housing discrimination, and democracy in the early Cold War United States. The collection reflects Hughes’s ongoing commitment to presenting African American political thought through accessible vernacular narrative. First developed in columns for the Chicago Defender, the Simple persona became one of Hughes’s most effective vehicles for blending oral tradition with pointed social critique, offering commentary on American racial double standards, including the observation: “In Russia they say, ‘We the people.’ In America, the people say, ‘We the rich.’” Published at a time of intensifying civil rights activism, the volume centers Harlem as both local community and national barometer of racial tension.

Hughes, Langston. Simple Stakes a Claim. New York: Rinehart & Company, 1957. Inscribed by the author on the front endpaper: “Very Happy Holidays to Eloise Davis from Dot — Sincerely, Langston Hughes, Christmas 1957.” First edition. 8vo. 190 pages. Beige cloth boards in green pictorial dust jacket. The book bears the printed dedication “To Adele Glasgow,” honoring Hughes’s longtime friend and secretary.

Appearing in 1957, the year of the Little Rock school integration crisis and amid mounting civil rights litigation, the work forms part of Hughes’s broader intervention into public conversations about race and democracy. Through Simple’s conversational mode, Hughes translated structural injustice into everyday speech, making Black working class perspectives legible within mainstream publishing. Minor creasing and rubbing to the dust jacket with light wear at the spine ends and a one quarter inch closed tear at the upper front margin; pages show mild toning, otherwise internally clean and sound; cloth binding stable. Overall very good in very good jacket.

Item #21987

Price: $1,850.00